Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Food-labeling initiative would sow confusion: Editorial

bates.jpg

Scott Bates, co-sponsor of the GMO labeling initiative, praises "an entire army of people" mobilized by the signature gathering effort. He says the momentum will carry over into a grassroots campaign that will help the measure pass in November.
(Yuxing Zheng/The Oregonian)

Backers of an initiative that would require labels for food produced using genetic engineering turned in more than 155,000 signatures this week, virtually guaranteeing a spot on the November ballot. Similar initiatives having failed in California in 2012 and in Washington in 2013, it's now Oregon's turn on the label-it movement's west-coast swing. With any luck, voters here will do justice to the state animal, the beaver, commonly known as nature's engineer.

OK, so trotting out an oversized rodent (no offense, Oregon State) is a cheap stunt rather than an argument in favor of a position. But what's the argument used by the initiative's backers? There are many, it turns out, and none justify labeling.

Results for recent food-labeling initiatives

California Proposition 37 (2012):

No: 51.4 percent

Yes: 48.6 percent

Washington Initiative 522 (2013):

No: 51.1 percent

Yes: 48.9 percent

You can find a hodgepodge of arguments listed in the text of the initiative and, separately, on the backers' web site. They include environmental concerns, labeling requirements in other countries, a desire to protect organic farmers in Oregon, even consumers' undefined "personal" reasons. All of these serve an overarching principle, which is that "Oregon consumers have the right to know whether the foods they purchase were produced with genetic engineering ..."

The right-to-know rationale does have some appeal and sets the stage for a potentially effective response to the inevitable campaign-spending spree by big agribusinesses. Labeling proponents will say, "See. They're trying to hide the truth from you," as if consumers were unwittingly scarfing down Soylent Green in a corn-chip bag. (Soylent Green is people, by the way, if you haven't seen the movie.)

Clever though the campaign may be, the consequences of victory would be highly deceptive, which is ironic considering that one of the initiative's stated purposes is to "reduce and prevent consumer confusion and deception ..."

The federal Food and Drug Administration does not require such labeling because there is simply no scientific or nutritional basis to do so. This is a point FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg reiterated in March by explaining to a House subcommittee, "The fact that a food contains GE ingredients does not constitute a material change in the product." Corn is corn.

What, then, is a consumer to believe when confronted in a grocery store aisle by a product labeled "in clear and conspicuous language," "Produced with Genetic Engineering"? Probably that the stuff may be riskier to eat than other foods. So why take the chance?

Labeling advocates are smart enough to limit their health-related claims, and for good reason. As the National Academy of Sciences concluded in a 2004 report on genetically engineered foods, "To date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population." If that had changed in the years since, you can bet labeling advocates would be trumpeting it. Instead, they argue that genetically engineered foods, which have been around for many years, have not yet been proven safe. Horrible things are just around the corner, in other words. Just wait.

If advocates were really concerned about consumer confusion, they'd tell them to buy products that are organic or otherwise free of genetically engineered material. But the label-it movement is less concerned with preventing consumer confusion than it is in stigmatizing products of which activists don't approve. If consumers come away believing genetically engineered stuff is unhealthy, so much the better.

Oregonians surely have a range of views on genetically engineered foods, including concerns about pesticide and herbicide use and antipathy for large companies that produce genetically engineered plants. Nonetheless, they should resist the call to require what is, in effect, a misleading scarlet letter on consumer products. Mandatory food labels should display nutritionally relevant information, not ideology.